This chapter proposes to unravel the many ecological underpinnings of Diogenes of Sinope’s Cynicism. Perhaps thinking cynically about climate change requires going back to Ancient Cynicism in general, and Diogenes of Sinope in particular; within the argument of this volume, this chapter explores the resurgence of Diogenes and the particular tone of the works of François Rabelais and Michel Montaigne. It makes a convincing case for reading both of these authors less as polar opposites and more as thinkers of the ecological shift in early modern France.

Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being ‘masters and possessors of Nature’ in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in this volume arguably demonstrated a more complex and urgent understanding of the human relationship to our shared planet. Opening up a rich archive of literary and non-literary texts produced by Montaigne and his contemporaries, this volume foregrounds not how ecocriticism renews our understanding of a literary corpus, but rather how that corpus causes us to re-think or to nuance contemporary eco-theory. The sparsely bilingual title (an acute accent on écologies) denotes the primary task at hand: to pluralize (i.e. de-Anglophone-ize) the Environmental Humanities. Featuring established and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States, Early Modern Écologies opens up new dialogues between ecotheorists such as Timothy Morton, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour and Montaigne, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and Olivier de Serres.